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Why I Have to Write

Aren’t words and concepts the antithesis of enlightenment? In an essay published in the March 2007 issue of Shambhala Sun, Norman wonders why he is compelled to write, and concludes that all language is a form of prayer.

A sangha favorite

I'm sure I've said this before, but this is truly one of my most favorite essays by Norman on the subject of writing. If you have a writing habit, you must read this.

SHAMBHALA SUN MARCH 2007 23

Though I know writing is a bad habit for a Zen priest, I can't help it. I seem to be writing all the time. I write poems of several varieties in several voices, journal entries, dharma talks, essays, books, notes, lists, stories, e-mails, blogs. In doing all this, I have no special purpose I can discern or explain. Though I hope it does somebody some good, I am not at all sure. It may even do some harm. More likely, it may just be a waste of time. What am I doing when I write? I am not documenting my life for my friends or posterity, nor am I telling anybody something they don't already know or need to hear from me. Why go on? I am compelled to, delighted to. There seems to be something crucial about working with language, something that wakes me up or brings a quality of density or significance to my life, even though I can't say what that significance is more than that it is a feeling or a texture. Besides, writing is a deep pleasure. And besides that, I have always written, seem to be a writer by temperament and impulse, and what writers do is write; they just can't help themselves.

Maybe I should get over this. Maybe there's an adhesive patch I can put on that will block the neural pathways that lead me down to the arteries of language. But if there were, I wouldn't wear it. Whether writing is good or bad, I affirm it like an athlete affirms her sport, a mother her child, or a believer his religion. I have noticed over the years in my conversations with writers that for a writer, writing is a sort of absolute bottom line. "Are you writing?" If the answer is yes, then no matter what else is going on your life- and all of life-is basically OK . You are who you are supposed to be and your existence makes sense. If the answer is no, then you are not doing well, your relationships and basic well-being are in jeopardy, and the rest of the world is dark and problematic.

Where does this need to splash around in language come from? Is it a disease? I'm not sure, but if so I don't think (William Burroughs notwithstanding) we will find the virus. I suppose the need to write comes from the connection between human consciousness and language-making. Language-making isn't incidental or ornamental to human consciousness; it is its center, its essence. No language, no person. And no language, no concept of life, of death, of sorrow or joy. No relationships, no tools. We are what we tell ourselves we are. Meditation practice brings the mind to a profound quiet that comes very close to the bottom of consciousness, and right there is the wellspring where language bubbles up. So does meditation get us beyond language? Is it true, as the old Zen teachers seem to be saying, that language is our whole human problem, the basic mistake we make, the mechanism of our suffering? Is this why it's such a big no-no to write?

Yes. Language is our big problem. Language ruins us and makes us suffer. Language is certainly my big problem. All my dissatisfactions would instantly disappear if I couldn't identify them or talk about them. But so would I. Without language I'd have no experience, no life in the world. To say that language is the problem is to say that life is the problem: it's true, but what are you going to do about it?

Well, you live. And, if you are a writer, you write. But here's the strange part: you write for the writing, you write alone and in silence, and you don't know if it does anyone any good-yet somehow you need a reader. This shouldn't be the case, but it is. Until there is a reader, some reader, any reader, the writing is incomplete. This is not true, for instance, with meditation practice or, say, with working out. You can run or bike or sit watching the breath without anyone ever witnessing it. It makes no difference whether someone witnesses or not. Because nothing comes of your running or sitting; there's nothing to share. But when you write you produce something that can be shared and somehow must be. You can't write without being read. This doesn't have to do with ambition or desire; it is built into the nature of writing.

I have been thinking about this for a thousand years. In the 1980s I sponsored a symposium in New York called Meditation and Poetry, in which I brought together a number of serious poets who meditated. My idea was to try to discover what these two activities have in common. I remember Jackson MacLow, the great avant-garde poet, saying, "I am chary (I particularly remember his use of this word) about mentioning these two in the same breath. They exist in different worlds. Writing is effective and public; meditation is private." Something like that.

But, one could argue, MacLow's writing was utterly private. He worked with chance operations and cut-up words, so that there was no intention or conventional communication in his work. He was never trying to say or describe anything. Still, he published copiously. Why?

A decade later I was involved in a similar symposium at Stanford. On the panel with me were the poets Leslie Scalapino and Michael McClure, both of whom practice meditation. We were asked by someone in the audience, "Whom do you write for?" and we all answered, in different ways, "No one." I remember that one of the professors in attendance (who, as it happened, was a Zen scholar) took serious issue with this. Writing must always be social, he argued. What we meant was not that we were uninterested in readership-we all publish a fair amount-but that in the act of writing we did not consider who the reader is or what he or she is going to make of what we are writing. We write to someone, but that person is essentially Nobody, without a name or social circumstances-we write for God. The Beyond. The Empty Nature of All Phenomena. Buddha Nature. The Mystery. We speak, and however little or much our words communicate, they touch something Out There. And somehow within the mind and within the words, that Out There is already implied. Don't ask me to explain.

Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.

And so, dear reader, know that at this moment of your reading this text in the pages of the Shambhala Sun, you are also touching the Mystery, the Nobody, at the center of your language-charged silence. I, the supposed author, about whom you may have formed some impression entirely of your own making, am not now talking to you. At the moment of your reading, amazingly enough, although I seem to be present, I am elsewhere, doing something else. I am unaware of who you are, and I don't know that you are reading these words now. And yet, at this moment, the moment when I am composing these words-a moment long past for you but immediate to me now-I am as close to myself, and to you, as it is humanly possible to be. _ If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, and being loved.

Norman gives his fourth and final talk on William Shakespeare's King Lear.Zoketsu Norman Fischer, 01/29/14

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